The council chief executive merry-go-round sees a £220,000 boss move from north London and a £30m budget shortfall, to take the reins at Brixton Town Hall, where the budget gap is £50m
Lambeth Council has appointed a new chief executive, with the cash-strapped Labour-run authority adding tens of thousands of pounds to its executive staffing bills by hiring Ian Davis.
Top job: but will Ian Davis take a wage cut to move from Enfield to Lambeth?
Davis has worked at Enfield Council for 17 years, the last seven as that borough’s chief executive on a salary of £221,604. Davis has been recruited as a replacement for Bayo Dosunmu, who quit the job in the summer after pleading guilty to drink driving, failing to stop after a car crash and driving without insurance.
Dosunmu was paid £187,000, while the Lambeth recruitment ad for his replacement offered a salary of £200,000. Which has led to some pondering whether Davis has agreed to take a significant pay cut, or whether Lambeth councillors have opted to up the ante.
Announcing the appointment, Lambeth Council said that Davis’s “appointment was recommended by a cross-party appointments committee and following an extensive recruitment process. He is expected to take up the new role in Lambeth in early 2025”.
Fiona Connolly, who has been filling in in the top job since August, will remain in the role until then.
Driven man: Bayo Dosunmu, was Lambeth’s CEO from 2022
Claire Holland, Lambeth’s council leader, said, “Ian is a local government leader with significant experience of driving service improvement and delivering better outcomes for residents. His wealth of experience, knowledge and commitment will be crucial to supporting the council to deliver our Lambeth 2030 ambitions, especially in the challenging financial times that local government faces.”
But amid the usual platitudes, Davis’s record in office might make raise some questions among Lambeth residents .
According to the Enfield Despatch (and they really ought to know…), “As well as leading the civic centre through the pandemic, much of Davis’s tenure coincided with a turbulent time politically in Enfield, particularly between 2018 and 2022, during which time there were claims from one former senior manager of a ‘toxic culture’ at the local authority…”
And if that didn’t ring any alarm bells, then a row last year should, after Davis was accused of running a “vanity project” when the council spent £632,000 on refurbishment of his own office. Meanwhile, Enfield under Davis is looking at closing eight public libraries, for a total saving of less than a refurbed CEO’s office.
Worrying times: Lambeth leader Claire Holland applied for a £50m bail-out earlier this year
Lambeth’s recruiters, with their council’s housing policies in disarray, possibly had an eye on Davis’s achievements, which include Enfield’s award-winning Meridian Water housing project and a borough-wide estate renewal of 3,000 homes.
Lambeth’s estate “regeneration” scheme is being wound-up following the Kerslake Review: Homes for Lambeth has been broken up, along with the recommendation of a complete “reset” of resident engagement, in another collapse of a Labour-run council’s housing scheme, as with Brick by Brick in Croydon.
There are some things at Brixton Town Hall that Davis will find familiar from his time in Enfield.
“Davis will be inheriting a similar bleak financial position when he rocks up at Lambeth Town Hall,” the ever-sceptical (with good reason) Brixton Buzz reports.
“He is walking away from a £30million shortfall in funding in Enfield, and straight into a £50million funding gap in Lambeth,”
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
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